Religion: Fighting Words

In London last week, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, was making a speech to his bishops and clergy. In the rich voice with which he dominated the radiocast of the coronation, the archbishop was ranging through the state of Christianity around the world when ears suddenly pricked to what sounded like fighting words—not against enemies of religion but against the Roman Catholic Church.

“I would mention a booklet to be published this week by S.P.C.K. [the Anglican ‘ Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge] entitled Infallible Fallacies,'” said the archbishop. “Roman Catholics in this country and wherever churches of the Anglican Communion exist have, as the booklet says, for some time past intensified their propaganda . . . We of the Anglican Communion . . . hate attacking another Christian body as much as many Roman Catholics deplore the constant attacks of their own church upon ours. But these attacks do call for occasional answers . . . and in this new booklet our people will find a reply . . .”

If Roman Catholics and Anglicans thought this was strong stuff to be coming from the top prelate of the Church of England, they opened their eyes wide when they turned to the pamphlet. Infallible Fallacies, by “Some Priests of the Anglican Communion,” is a closely reasoned piece of polemic in a venerable but almost forgotten tradition. Samples:

¶ “The doctrinal errors of the Roman Church are a formidable obstacle in the path of any great movement of Anglicans towards the Roman Church … The Infallibility of the Pope … is perhaps the most obviously unscriptural and erroneous of these new doctrines . . . And the fact that there have been so few ‘infallible’ utterances of the Pope (and so much argument by Roman Catholics as to how many there have been—the estimates vary between three and nine) leads to the conclusion that the doctrine really is nonsense.”

¶”Although this iniquitous practice [of selling indulgences directly] has been discontinued, the Roman Church still makes huge profits out of the credulous belief of simple people in indulgences, by the alms which are encouraged when indulgences are sought, and by the sale of rosaries and other ‘indulgenced’ articles. Few Anglican priests would care to become involved in such wholesale exploitation of simple people’s credulity.”

¶ “[The] great bureaucratic system of the Roman Catholic Church, centralized in Rome and tightly controlled by the Pope, is totalitarian. The transition from one kind of totalitarianism to another is an easy one. and it is well known that the countries of Western Europe in which Communism is strongest today are the predominantly Roman Catholic countries.”

¶ “The close discipline exercised by Roman Catholic priests upon the laity . . . often amounts to spiritual bullying. Decisions which normal persons ought … to make for themselves in obedience to their consciences are made by the Pope and enforced through the priests—such questions as what schools their children may attend, or what books they may read.” ¶ “Some of the Roman Catholic methods of proselytizing are most objectionable . . . Particularly do we condemn the practice . . . of touting for converts among the seriously ill and dying in hospitals. There have been instances of lifelong loyal Anglicans being pestered by Roman Catholic priests when in no physical or mental condition to resist.”

¶ “There is, moreover, a certain duplicity which is to be detected in the Roman Catholic official mind. One example must suffice here. The Roman Church officially upholds the plain teaching of Christ against remarriage after divorce. But in practice it allows it by means of various legal devices—chiefly by multiplying the possible reasons for annulment. Thus the Roman Church manages to gain on the one hand the reputation for strictness, but on the other is able to allow the remarriage of those it particularly desires to please.”